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Input Monitoring in Digital Performer : March 2008 Home Search News Articles Forum SOS TV Subscribe Shop Directory
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There's more useful stuff than you can shake a stick at this month, including advice on input monitoring, ways to get around latency issues, and news of CD-burning and audio networking applications to make your life easier.
Robin Bigwood
Over the last couple of months we've been looking at monitoring: what it is, and how to make it work for you in Digital Performer with a range of typical studio situations and hardware setups. In this final instalment of our monitoring extravaganza, DP5's Input Monitor function and aux tracks come under the spotlight, and I offer suggestions for incorporating hardware effects units into your DP-based rig.
To illustrate what I mean, imagine Reason and DP are running on the same Mac. The Rewire link between the two applications carries audio from Reason to DP, but in order to hear Reason at all some sort of 'open input' is needed in DP. An aux track is often perfect for this, bringing the Reason audio into DP's Mixing Board, and allowing it to be mixed alongside other track types. What the aux track is really doing is monitoring the live signal from Reason, allowing the engineer to hear it while working on other aspects of the mix, just as a singer would hear a backing track as they recorded vocals. These 'open inputs' are useful for all sorts of things, not just Reason. You could use them to monitor the return from a hardware effects unit, the signal from a hardware synth, or a signal from another Mac arriving digitally via an ADAT connection or across a network. All these need to be monitored as you work on your track, until you choose to record them and capture their signals to an audio track. So what are the options available to you? Aux tracks: Aux tracks are a long-standing DP feature. You can't record on them; instead they're a lot like mixing desk channels. They can be fed with inputs from your audio interface, DP's internal busses, or the Rewire signal from other software all of which is useful from a monitoring point of view. What's great about them, too, is that their operation is not affected by DP5's Audio Patch Thru mode you could have it set to Off and they'd still work. Also, if you have a MOTU audio interface and are using Direct Hardware Playthrough mode, they still allow you to monitor your input through any effects plug-ins instantiated. Audio tracks: You've always been able to monitor input signals through audio tracks, courtesy of DP's Audio Patch Thru feature, by simply record-enabling them. But in recent versions of DP you have more flexibility, thanks to the Input Monitor function. This means that an audio track can be made to permanently 'patch thru' its input to its output, whether the track is record-enabled or not. Just click the track's Input Monitor button in the Tracks Overview (the 'Mon' column), Sequence Editor (a loudspeaker icon in the track's info pane) or Mixing Board (the Input button next to Rec, Solo and Mute). An Input Monitor-enabled audio track is not quite the same as an aux track, though. First, it does respect DP5's Audio Patch Thru mode, so if that's set to Off the Input Monitor function is essentially disabled. Also, if you're using Direct Hardware Playthrough mode with a compatible MOTU audio interface, Input Monitor will not run the signal through DP (or any effects plug-ins on the track), but instead set up a temporary CueMix zero-latency routing. Zero-latency hardware monitoring: There's nothing to say we have to control all monitor signals from external hardware with DP. In many cases the best approach is to monitor external effects returns, and especially hardware synths, via a hardware mixer or an audio interface with zero-latency monitoring, as you might when setting up monitoring for a vocal take. The external hardware signals can be incorporated into your control room mix independently of DP, until you want to record them into your track. At this point you just record-enable some audio tracks in DP and route them in.
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A Real-world Example
Here's a situation I've mocked up that incorporates all three types of input monitoring, using my own setup of a Power Mac G5 and MOTU Traveler (which has CueMix zero-latency monitoring). I'm running DP 5.13 and Reason 4, and also have some external hardware: a Korg Radias synth and a Yamaha REV500 reverb. This is how everything's co-ordinated (see screen at start of article): Input: Reason software Monitoring Method: Input Monitor-enabled audio track. Description: As it's providing some synth and percussion parts, I want to monitor Reason constantly as I work on my song. Using an audio track with Input Monitor allows me to do this, and when I'm
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Now, if you're thinking DP5 has built-in latency compensation you're right, but it's only for hosted plug-ins, not external routing. However, a freeware Audio Unit plug-in does exist that does exactly what's needed for external routing latency compensation: it's Latency Fixer, from www.collective.co.uk/expertsleepers and it's a nifty little thing. It works by first reporting a latency (which, using the controls, you set manually in terms of seconds or samples) to DP. DP then compensates for this latency by sending track audio to the plug-in ahead of time, but the plug-in actually applies no delay at all to the audio passing through it. Consequently, if you place it on an aux track that's being used to feed your audio tracks to an external effects unit, the latency accumulated in the trip out of DP and back in again can be precisely compensated for after a bit of experimentation. The screens above show how I use it to route audio tracks to my external hardware compressor, the output of which comes right back into my DP Mixing Board.
I incorporate my REV500 reverb unit into my DP mixes by having it patched into my Traveler interface. I can then route track signals to it via an aux send (as on the Vocals track here), and I also need an aux track to handle its signal coming back into DP. Using the Latency Fixer AU plug-in I can completely eradicate the latency that would otherwise occur in this arrangement.
DP To CD?
In the August and September 2007 Performer workshops I looked at some ways in which DP can be used to prepare an album-length project for CD burning. DP's multitrack audio capabilities, flexible effects and automation make it very good for this task, even though it doesn't have any features specifically designed for it. DP can't do CD-burning, so you have to transfer the resulting audio files to another application, and it's here that you can have difficulties. For example, the applications that can work with DP's native stereo audio format, Split Sound Designer II, are either discontinued (Roxio's Jam), not available separately (Apple WaveBurner), don't read region information (i3 DSP Quattro) or are very expensive (Bias Peak Pro and Sonic Studio PreMaster CD). Wouldn't it be great to have an audio editor that could load any audio format, including SD2, correctly read region information, and offer heavyweight editing, dithering, export and burning options? Now, in the form of an updated Wave Editor by Audiofile Engineering, you can. Wave Editor 1.3 is a thoroughly up-to-date application, utilising OS X's Core Audio features and presenting a slick, customisable user interface. Its really unique feature is a multi-layer (as opposed to multi-track) approach to editing, whereby you can assemble on a time-line different sections of audio at any sample rate and resolution, applying fades, crossfades and other processing on or between each layer. When the time comes for burning a CD or
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